ARTICLE
James Smetham (1821-1889) and Gilchrist’s Life of Blake
Frances Carey
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Volume 8, Issue 1-2, Summer-Fall 1974, pp. 17-25 -'-x
JBT. *6.] STBUGGLE AND 80EB0W. J4C 55
of the same suggestive theme, is Let loose the Dogs of War—a Demon cheering on bloodhounds who seize a man by the throat; of which Mr. Ruskin possesses the original pencil sketch, Mr. Linnell the watercolour drawing. During the summer of 1784, died Blake's father, an honest shopkeeper of the old school, and a devout man—a dissenter. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, on the fourth of July (a Sunday) says the Register. The eldest son, James,—a year and a half William's senior,—continued to hive with the widow Catherine, and succeeded • 0*to the hosier' s business in Broad Street, still a highly respectable street, and a good one for trade, as it and the whole neighbour i a hood continued until the era of Nash and the ' first gentleman in w Europe.' Golden Square was still the 'town residence' of some f halfdozen M.P.'s—for county or rotten borough; Poland Street and Great Marlborough Street of others. Between this brother and the artist no strong sympathy existed, little community of sentiment J*Zl or common ground (mentally) of any kind ; although indeed, James — for the most part an humble matteroffact man—had his spiritual and visionary side too ; would at times talk Swedenhorg, talk of seeing Abraham and Moses, and to outsiders seem like his gifted y vw> brother ' a bit mad'—a mild madman instead of a wild and stormy. i •■ z ■* On his father's death, Blake, who found Design yield no income, Engraving but a scanty one, returned from Green Street, Leicester J,.RH/. Fields, to familiar Broad Street At No. 27, next door to his brother's, he set up shop as printseller and engraver, in partnership with a former fellowapprentice at Basire's: James Parker, a man some six m or seven years his senior. An engraving by Blake after Stothard, Zephyrus and Flora (a long oval), was published by the firm ' Parker and Blake' this same year (1784). Mrs. Mathew, still friendly and patronizing, though one day to be less eager for the poet's services as Lion in Rathbone Place, countenanced, nay perhaps first set the scheme going—in an illadvised philanthropic hour; favouring it,
James Smetham (1821 1889) and Gilchrist's Life of Blake
BY FRANCES A. CAREY 18
James Smetham's claim on posterity has largely Ruskin prophesied in 1854,4 and Smetham was rested upon his 1869 review of Gilchrist's Life of eventually to subside into an endogenous depressive Blake which was incorporated in the second edition illness from 1878 until his death of 1889. The at Rossetti's instigation. This sympathetic but Smetham correspondence exhibits some of the same conventional mid-Victorian interpretation of Blake only represents a minor aspect of Smetham's career; his letters and paintings do far greater justice to the complexity of a man, whom Geoffrey Grigson has described as "an imaginative artist who surpasses 1 G. Grigson, The Harp of Aeolus (London, 1948), pp. 96-97. almost all his time in England."2 This article 2 Collection of Dr. Gerald Bindman. will concentrate upon Smetham's visual imagination seen in the light of the marginal illustrations 3 A. Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, 2nd ed. (London, 1880). with which he annotated his own copy of the p. 429. 2 Gilchrist Life. 4 J. Ruskin, Works, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, 1903-12), XIV, 461. An almost overwhelming degree of spirituality pervades Smetham's small scale biblical and land- scape compositions, which prompted Rossetti to Frances Carey has undertaken postgraduate study at invoke parallels with the work of Blake and Palmer: Harvard and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. "In all these he partakes greatly of Blake's She is currently writing her doctoral thesis on immediate spirit, being also often allied by land- "English Religious Painting 1770-1830" for the scape intensity to Samuel Palmer."3 The emotional Courtauld Institute, London University. She is energy required to achieve such an effect, did, the Newsletter's new Associate Editor for the however, contain the seeds of self-destruction as United Kingdom. 19
5 intimate, revelatory quality as the Haydon diaries, in later years, he would revisit his monuments, unfolding a personality which partook of "Blake's "pouring the oil of joy on the shapeless stone in immediate spirit" transmuted by a powerful strain of which I saw my thought as Michael Angelo in his Methodist piety; this bifureal influence clearly marble saw hidden the gigantic shapes of Niqht and emerges in the unifying theme of the letters, Day. "8 Smetham's concept of destiny in terms of a Pilgrim's Progress which, in visual form, was poignantly Smetham's copy of Gilohrist is a peculiarly summarized by one of his last paintings, Going Home, 5 apt example of monumentalism since he had been depicting an old man on the road to death. recommended by Rossetti in 1861 as a suitable Smetham's endeavor to develop a fully integrated draughtsman for the line drawings in the text. In imagination combining "art, literature and the 7 the event Smetham was deprived of the commission religious life all in one," was reflected in a but in July 1867 supplied his own miniature cycle self-imposed regime of intense, disciplined study, of the life of Blake, which paid a self-conscious the results of which were enshrined in a system of monimentalism; the grandiose designation of monument was in fact applied to a tiny, squared pen drawing, encapsulating in the margin Smetham's thoughts on the text in question. Shakespeare, the Bible, Tennyson and Gilchrist's Life of Blake were }\ A' S^n^m ' Letter8> eds- w- Davies and Sarah Smetham (London, 1891). all subjected to this approach, which was initiated by the artist at eleven o'clock on the evening of 6 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. 18 February 1848. The creative fervor and elevation of purpose infusing the thumbnail sketches, 7 Smetham, Letters, p. 1 3 . is eloquently expressed by Smetham's account of how, 8 Smetham, Letters, p. 9 2 .
and bed
left p. 39: "away I go, / And the vale darkens at my pensive woe." right p. 69: "In a vision of the night, the form of Robert stood before him, and revealed the wished-for secret, directing him to the technical mode by which could be produced a fac-simile of song and design." 20 homage to the marginal illustrations of medieval (p. 96), are all treated to the same loving manuscripts. For Smetham an illuminated book was delineation. In the second volume the monuments "a mystery, like the Microcosm" into whose borders are almost exclusively confined to William Michael were wrouqht "the whole life and soul and history Rossetti's annotated catalogue, where Smetham used of the men who did them; but thinly veiled."5 the descriptions attached to each item as a basis The Gilchrist marginal designs provide just such a for illustration; his own knowledge of Blake's documentation of the artist's inner life concealed visual art was probably limited to the reproductions beneath the commentary on Blake's spiritual history; in Gilchrist. Smetham's naive, literal renderings author portraits of Smetham himself periodically of poetic images constitute a further category of intrude upon the Blakean cycle, again reminiscent monument; punctuating the line from the Poetical of the practice of medieval scribes and illuminators. Sketches, "And the vale darkens at my pensive woe," The main pictorial narrative includes not only a lonely figure is represented wandering amidst episodes and personalities from Blake's material gloomy obscurity (p. 39). These evocative visual existence but also those from his visionary world; annotations serve to underline the unifying links "majestic shadows, grey but luminous and superior between the "whole life and soul and history" of to the common height of men" encountered on the Smetham and his subject, which are perhaps Felpham shore (p. 159), have as much substance as epitomized by his impression of Blake's soul Mrs. Mathew's bluestockings (p. 45) or the Godwin finding "refuge amid the slights of the outward circle of radicals (p. 92); a corporeal Robert vulgar throng" in the invisible world (p. 245). Blake plays leap-frog with J. T. Smith on one page (p. 57), then later appears in spiritual form to reveal to his elder brother the secret of stereotype printing (p. 69), while funeral processions, whether they be for fairies (p. 159) or Sir Joshua Reynolds 9 Smetham, Letters, p. 93.
above p. 8 3 : Blake's vision of Isaiah and E z e k i e l in "A M e m o r a b l e Fancy," The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. a; rly
above p. 85: "A Memorable Fancy"—"Here I stayed to rest, and then leaped into the void between Saturn and the fixed stars." 22
above p. 92: The radicals in Johnson's house. top p. 157: Blake at Felpham. "Often, in after years, Blake would speak with enthusiasm of the shifting lights on the sea he had watched from those windows." bottom p. 159: "majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common height of men." 24
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top p. 159: A fairy funeral. bottom p. 245: Blake's soul finding refuge in the invisible world amid the slights of the outward vulgar throng. 25
above p. 248: Blake drawing the Laocoon in the Royal Academy.